Har Ghar Tiranga: When Crores of Homes Raised the Same Flag
A campaign asked Indians to hoist the National Flag at home for three days in August 2022. The response outran the target — and left a question about what happens to all those flags afterwards.
In August 2022, as India marked seventy-five years of Independence under Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav, the Ministry of Culture asked citizens to do something the Flag Code had only recently made straightforward: hoist the National Flag at their own homes.
The Har Ghar Tiranga campaign set a target of twenty crore homes over three days. By the government's own accounting the response went well past it, with the flag reported hoisted at more than twenty-three crore homes, and around six crore people uploading selfies with the flag to the campaign website. In 2023 the selfie count crossed ten crore.
Getting that many flags into that many hands was its own logistics exercise. India Post sold more than a crore National Flags in ten days through roughly one and a half lakh post offices. State governments mobilised self-help groups; local tailoring units and small manufacturers were brought in to produce at volume.
What made it possible at all were two changes to the Flag Code. A 2021 amendment permitted machine-made and polyester flags in addition to hand-spun khadi, dramatically increasing how many flags could be produced. A 2022 amendment allowed a flag displayed in the open or on a citizen's house to be flown at night as well as during the day — before that, the Tiranga could only be flown between sunrise and sunset.
The campaign succeeded on its own terms. Crores of families who had never hoisted a flag at home did so, and many have done it every August since.
It also created a consequence nobody planned for. Tens of crores of flags entered ordinary households — and cotton and polyester left out in monsoon rain and summer sun do not last. Within a year or two, a great many of those flags were faded, frayed or torn.
That is the part of the story still being written. A flag that is no longer fit to fly cannot simply be thrown away; under the Flag Code it must be destroyed as a whole, in private, in a manner consistent with its dignity. Most households have never been told this, and it is precisely the gap our Flag Exchange programme exists to close.